Decomposed so each box does what only it does well, and so sovereignty is structural — the perimeter you own gates the platform you rent.
Gates every packet. Issues identity. Receives the telemetry the rest of the network emits.
Runs Hermes persistently. Holds skill memory and tool servers. Swappable for Qthonic over time.
Apple Silicon + MLX. A single role — serve LLM inference — joined to the network as a leaf.
Everything is designed virtually before it ships. Builds the Gate image; outputs deploy unchanged.
The architecture lives at the type layer — an intermediate representation between what must be true and the product that fills it. Software is a dated, swappable backend target.
Why it matters: when a vendor relicenses, you swap the adapter and the port is untouched. When Qthonic matures, it enters as a new adapter for an existing type — a column edit, not a redesign. The Hermes→Qthonic swap is built into the shape.
Stop at any phase and still hold a coherent posture. The first six are secure-enough — ship them. The rest is the perf/sec long tail, layered in over time.
The secure-enough core is 100% ownable. Across the full stack, ~88% is at least forkable — the unownable remainder is named, mitigated, and never on the critical path.
The same declarative policy moves from commodity silicon to your own substrate. Hardware evolves; the expression layer stays declarative.
eBPF policy, kernel-resident. ~$80–180 used ConnectX-5.
→Same policy, DPU-resident. Used BlueField-2.
→Programmable pipeline. True line-rate typed policy.
→TPR-native typed policy. The substrate becomes the regulation.